Law and Race Commons^™

Esg Investing Breaches Erisa Fiduciary Duties? A Closer Look At Spence V. American Airlines, Inc., Eric Chin-Ru Chang

Seattle University Law Review

In Spence v. American Airlines, Inc., the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas found that American Airlines breached its fiduciary duties due to BlackRock’s ESG investing practices. Contrary to some reports suggesting that the ruling prohibits ESG investing under ERISA, a closer look at the ruling shows that the court only targeted American Airlines’ failure to manage conflicts of interest appropriately, rather than the legality of ESG investing itself. In light of the intensifying ESG backlash in the United States, this Article cautions against further restrictive measures on ESG investing. Such measures would exacerbate the widening …

Adjudicating Atrocity: Reading Hitesh Verma V State Of Uttarakhand As A "Landmark" Case In The Judicial Discourse On Caste Violence, Tejaswi Chhatwal

Socio-Legal Review

This article critically examines the Supreme Court’s judgment in Hitesh Verma v State of Uttarakhand (2020) and argues for reading it as a “landmark trial” in the judicial undoing of reform—namely, the statutory changes introduced by the 2016 Amendment to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989. Existing socio-legal scholarship on atrocity jurisprudence has shown that the judicial understanding of caste violence and doctrinally instituted evidentiary standards have historically operated to invisibilise caste from crime’s framework. As a result, most instances of caste-based discrimination and violence have not been named as offences of “atrocity” under the …

Letter From The Editors, Michael Green & Emily Epstein

Loyola Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Interest Law

No abstract provided.

"Have You Met My Lawyer?" And "Making Lists Of What Was Lost", Kirsten Anderson

Loyola Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Interest Law

The theme of what justice looks like for those experiencing homelessness finds expression in two poems by social justice lawyer and poet Kirsten Anderson. Based on her nearly two decades of representing clients experiencing homelessness, she explores the nature of the client-lawyer relationship in a society where lawyers are usually only available to persons with wealth and power. Both poems explore the consequences of housing not being recognized as a human right—given visible expression in a humanitarian crisis of homelessness in a country where the rent is unaffordable for more than half the population.

The first poem, “Have you met …

Los Angeles Encampments, Christopher Chinn

Loyola Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Interest Law

My most recent work is not created in the shelter of a studio, but outside on the streets of my community and city. This on-going body of work challenges the accepted practice of “en plein air” painting by presenting not the picturesque and beautiful, but ugly and dirty places most avoid at great length, and do not wish to even see, encampments of Los Angeles’s unhoused residents. Painting is slow. The people who live in the tents and bivouacs that I paint are often very curious and ask me about what I am doing. In this way my work opens …

Beyond The Flames: Housing Justice And Rebuilding After The Wildfires, Michala Storms, Awoenam Mauna-Woanya, Christopher Chinn, Kaimipono D. Wenger

Loyola Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Interest Law

The speakers for this symposium explored the intersection of housing justice and the legal and policy obstacles encountered in rebuilding efforts in Los Angeles following the devastating wildfires. The wildfires burned more than 55,000 acres. That's approximately the size of Los Angeles city. Destroyed over 16,251 structures and has claimed at least 29 lives. These fires were the most catastrophic in all of Los Angeles County's history. The speakers discussed the challenges faced by displaced communities amid ongoing housing shortages, as well as the broader implications for housing policy and zoning. The conversation examined how attorneys, policy makers and the …

Flattening The Eviction Curve: Lessons From Los Angeles About Tenant Protection During A Pandemic (And Beyond), Kaimipono D. Wenger

Loyola Interdisciplinary Journal of Public Interest Law

Health policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic often focused on “flattening the curve.” Health officials and politicians took steps to try to limit the number of people who were sick at any one time, to protect hospitals from being overwhelmed by a flood of patients. Some legal responses to evictions during this time were based on a similar rationale.

Similar to public health concerns around Covid-19, tenant advocates were concerned with the possibility that economic effects of the pandemic could lead to a “tsunami” of evictions hitting all at once and overwhelming legal advocates and tenant communities. Tenant advocates argued …

Myths And Magical Thinking: American Civil Religion, The Establishment Clause, And “Codified Irrationality” In Anti-Crt Measures, Kyle Reinhard

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

In Part I, I preview some of the overlapping tensions in U.S. public schooling created by the occasionally competing mandates of education federalism and democratic theory; describe the current state of the law with respect to the constitutionality of state and local governments seeking to inculcate (allegedly) prosocial community values in curriculum; and consider how battles over the meaning of “patriotism” through the decades show that ideology and religion often blend—and still, inevitably, make it—into the public square broadly nonetheless.

In Part II, I describe how religion is a useful tool, both descriptively and as a constitutional jurisprudential framework, …

Whose Right(S)?: Civil Rights Impact Of Cultural Conflicts In The Curriculum, S. David Mitchell

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

Opponents of anti-woke legislation have challenged the presumption that the topics being taught are divisive or designed to indoctrinate students with a liberal or Left leaning ideology. Instead, they argue that these topics tell the unvarnished history of the United States. Furthermore, opponents have also challenged the asserted legality and validity of anti-woke legislation, arguing that the legislation infringes upon the First Amendment, specifically students’ and teachers’ academic freedom, students’ right to learn, and parents’ right to direct and control the education of their children. Unlike other controversial topics such as sexual education, which are taught in courses that …

From Freedom Schools To Freedom: A New Vision Of Desegregation, Joseph Kim

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

I begin with Part I, where I hone in on the school integration movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. I start at Brown v. Board of Education. When asked about Brown, most if not all people associate it with the racial integration of segregated public schools and the demise of Plessy v. Ferguson’s separate-but-equal doctrine. However, importantly, I argue that racial integration was not necessarily required by Brown. Rather than mandating racial integration of segregated schools, Brown mandated desegregation of segregated schools. The distinction between “desegregation” and “racial integration” is an important one. While …

Promising The First Amendment: (De)Regulating Speech In Higher Education, Max M. Schanzenbach, Kimberly A. Yuracko

Northwestern University Law Review

The war between Hamas and Israel has caused havoc in higher education. Amid student unrest, alumni pressure, congressional hearings, civil rights investigations, and student lawsuits, universities stand at a crossroads. The current situation, in which most private universities unevenly regulate student speech under ambiguous student codes, is not sustainable politically or legally. A tsunami of litigation and regulatory actions has already begun. One increasingly favored response is for private universities to more vigorously enforce existing codes or expand their scope. An alternative is for private universities to deregulate student expression and commit by contract to the First Amendment. This Article …

Generative Suspicion And The Risks Of Ai-Assisted Police Reports, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

Northwestern University Law Review

Police reports play a central role in the criminal justice system. Many times, police reports exist as the only official memorialization of what happened during an incident, shaping probable cause determinations, pretrial detention decisions, motions to suppress, plea bargains, and trial strategy. For over a century, human police officers wrote the factual narratives that shaped the trajectory of individual cases and organized the entire legal system.

This practice is about to change with the creation of AI-assisted police reports. Today, with the click of a button, large language models (LLMs), a type of generative AI using predictive text capabilities, can …

Much Ado About Critical Race Theory, Matthew Patrick Shaw

Washington and Lee Law Review

This Article offers novel observation and critical intervention in the challenge to state laws which have been adopted, allegedly, to prevent the teaching of critical race theory

(CRT) in public schools. Against the trend of recent scholarship that understands these laws as curricular censorship of topical subjects and seeks to contest their validity on those grounds, this Article more accurately identifies them as pedagogical censorship: Limits on teaching methods, which raise different, potentially more dispositive questions about the states’ educational decision-making authority—questions that the U.S. Supreme Court has long sought to avoid. But exposing these so-called “anti-CRT” laws as neither …

The Racialized Retaliatory State: Weaponizing Immigration Law To Criminalize Dissent, Karla Mckanders

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

This Essay examines how systemic racism impacts the ways immigration laws operate to retaliate and criminalize immigrants who dissent. Criminalizing dissent—which recently has become more widespread—is one tool within the immigration system that reinforces America’s racialized caste system. This Essay frames immigration exceptionalism as a continual state that excludes nonconforming bodies and ideologies to instill fear as a means of authoritarian governance. This Essay challenges the history of immigration exceptionalism as an objectively neutral system of governance, arguing that it has historically criminalized racialized migrants to suppress dissent and ideological viewpoints that are not aligned with America’s racialized project. Immigration …

“That’S Not My Name”: The Linguistic Violence Of Misnaming Parties In Court Proceedings, Robert S. Chang, Cecily C. Hazelrigg, Linda Cj Lee

Washington Law Review

This Article calls attention to the harms done when parties are misnamed in legal proceedings. Misnaming, which many might initially consider trivial, is properly understood as a form of linguistic violence that can inflict dignitary harms as well as have material consequences. Misnaming takes on a different valence when it is done by the state. This Article focuses on the misnaming of Indigenous, Asian, and Latine people, beginning first with the way misnaming is done by the administrative state. The authors then discuss misnaming as it has operated in legal proceedings, providing both historical and contemporary examples from federal and …

Making Youth Matter, Kimberly Ambrose

Washington Law Review

Gun violence is the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the United States. The harm caused by this public health crisis falls disproportionately on Black and Brown youth. While it is broadly accepted that children are less blameworthy than adults for their criminal behavior, what does this mean when they have access to and use guns? The Supreme Court held that youth matters when juveniles face life without parole sentences because children are different from adults—they fail to appreciate risks and consequences; are more impulsive; more susceptible to peer and family influence; less able to remove themselves …

Another Broken Promise: The Mmiwg2s Crisis And The Violation Of The Federal Indian Trust Obligation, Marley Forest

Washington Law Review

Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people go missing and are murdered at rates nearly ten times the national average in the United States. This disproportionate epidemic of violence has been labeled the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit (MMIWG2S) crisis. Several factors exacerbate this crisis. First, European colonizers used violence against Native people, especially women and Two-Spirit people, as a tactic of control and domination since first contact in the 1600s. Second, nearly two hundred years of legislative actions and case law have effectively stripped Native Nations of all criminal jurisdictional power over crimes committed on their land …

Fairer Public Benefit In Copyright Law, Amanda Levendowski Tepski

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In 1966, a court considered expressly whether a secondary use of copyrighted works served a public benefit. While public benefit has become a subfactor of the fair use doctrine, it remains undefined, uncodified, and undertheorized. Courts often invoked public benefit in pivotal cases involving novel technologies, from home video recorders to digital libraries to algorithms--but they did not need to. After the recent Supreme Court decision in Google v. Oracle, however, public benefit is unavoidable: The Court stated that “we must take into account the public benefits the copying will likely produce.” A qualitative analysis of key public benefit cases …

The Deferential Asian American: Low Racial Status And The Invisibility Of Asian Americans In Leadership And The American Narrative, Reginald Oh

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

This Article will proceed in five parts. First, an important caveat. When the Article refers to Asian Americans, it refers to all Asian American subgroups except for South Asian Americans, because South Asian Americans are not perceived to be deferential in the same way as other Asian American subgroups. Consequently, their experience with leadership is unique among Asian Americans, and much of the analysis in this Article does not apply to them.

With that caveat, Part I will discuss the invisibility of Asian Americans generally, but particularly in leadership positions. Part II will discuss the concept of social status …

Michelle Adams On Detroit, The Supreme Court, And School Segregation, Floersheimer Center For Constitutional Democracy, Black Law Students Association (Blsa), Alexander A. Reinert, Michelle Adams, James Foreman Jr.

2025 Event Invitations

Join us for a special evening with Michelle Adams, the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, and former Cardozo Professor, as she discusses her acclaimed new book The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for School Desegregation.